Wednesday 29 August 2012

National Schools Film Week

Like many home educating parents, I frequently used to muscle in on school activities at museums, zoos and anywhere else I could manage. Lectures, handling sessions, behind the scenes tours; you name it and I would be there, tagging along with my young daughter and trying to look like all the other teachers. Sometimes, we would get chucked out, often nobody had the nerve to challenge us. Those were great days! There were events organised with schoolchildren in mind to which only a few home educators actually turned up. I remember with particular pleasure the Zimbabwean sculpture workshop at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. The idea was to make the museum more accessible and attractive for black schoolchildren and so they engaged three Zimbabweans to teach the kids how to carve soapstone using traditional, African methods. They had budgeted for thirty schoolchildren; in the event, nobody at all turned up, apart from  five home educating parents and their kids, all of whom were white. This meant that my daughter had virtually one-to-one tuition in sculpting stone for a whole afternoon.


I have been thinking about all this because of the fuss going on on various home education lists and on the Facebook page of the National Schools Film Week. As some home educators will know, this offers free showings of films at cinemas to schoolchildren. Not just schoolchildren, of course, home educated children can also go along if they want; we did ourselves when my daughter was younger. The details of this event may be found here:



http://www.nationalschoolsfilmweek.org/
 




Now because this is aimed primarily at schoolchildren and is free, many teachers book up parties of kids to go to see films and then don’t bother to turn up. This is precisely what happened with the Zimbabwean sculpture workshop which I mentioned above. The result might be a cinema opening and showing a film for just three or four children. To prevent this happening, the charity behind this, Film Education, have decided that they want at least ten children at each showing, just to make it worthwhile for everybody to turn up and run the projector and so on. They are also threatening to ’fine’ schools £50 if they book up a sessions and then don’t turn up. Anybody see anything wrong with all this? Of course not, it is perfectly reasonable. Cue the sort of mad response in which some home educators specialise. This is ‘discrimination’ and ‘bias’ against home educators. It is outrageous, how dare they try and prevent home educated children from joining in this event!

See what happens when you try to get home educators to follow exactly the same rules as everybody else? The comments on the face book page are now boiling over with rage and people are threatening legal action against the charity. You couldn’t, as they say, make it up! On the HE-UK list, people are being urged to bombard the charity’s website with angry messages. There is also a bizarre suggestion that the Charity Commission should be contacted. Let’s see what the stated aim of the charity is, according to the information which they supplied to the Charity Commission:



FILM EDUCATION PROVIDES FREE, CURRICULUM-BASED RESOURCES WHICH TEACHERS USE TO TEACH VARIOUS SUBJECTS THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF FILM. FILM EDUCATION ALSO PRODUCES FREE FILM SCREENING PROGRAMMES FOR SCHOOLCHILDREN, MOST NOTABLY NATIONAL SCHOOLS FILM WEEK.


See the mention of teachers and schoolchildren? This is because the charity is really concerned with schools. They don’t mind home educated children joining in the activities, but on the same terms as everybody else. Which is of course sheer anathema for many home educating parents…

It is idiots like this who give home education the bad name which it has with many ordinary people who might otherwise feel well disposed or at least neutral towards the idea. Instead of just jogging along and working the system like everybody else, they always seem to need special consideration. The rules never apply for them. Whether it is attending free cinema performances, provision of which is now being treated by some of these clowns as some sort of human right, or getting places at a further education college; they must never be expected to conform to the same standards as the rest of the world. No wonder so many people grow weary of their antics and get the impression that all home educators are either bloody-minded barrack-room lawyers or else frankly just raving mad.

8 comments:

  1. Mixed feelings about this - as a HE groups we always booked large numbers of tickets each year without issue - in fact it was only last year when we lacked a willing volunteer to do the job we discovered individual families could book!

    NSFW have explained that they want bigger groups to reduce the huge admin of lots of small family groups booking, so I can't get too steamed up about this...but then I live in an area with big organised HE groups who are easily able to manage group booking!

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Like many home educating parents, I frequently used to muscle in on school activities at museums, zoos and anywhere else I could manage...Sometimes, we would get chucked out, often nobody had the nerve to challenge us."

    Do they? We wouldn't have dreamed of doing this! If we had seen a talk or tour that interested us, we would have arranged a group HE visit with them. I suspect this kind of behaviour (along with climbing over safety barriers at zoos to enable young children to stroke lions and crocodiles) would be at least as likely to give home educators a bad name as arguing about the chance to continue to attend films in small groups.

    ReplyDelete
  3. 'over safety barriers at zoos to enable young children to stroke lions and crocodiles'

    To be fair, it was a tiger. Stroking the crocodile was an offical event at Syon Park Aquatic Centre; coincidentally, one arranged for schools. No clambering over barriers was required.

    'If we had seen a talk or tour that interested us, we would have arranged a group HE visit with them'

    And very right and proper too. However, when I saw empty spaces at an event where there were schoolchildren, it never struck me that I would be depriving anybody of anything if I just slipped in with my daughter. The whole thing was done with great good humour and few objected. Most of the time, people just assumed that I was a teacher from another school... This might of course have been because I tend to have a maddeningly slow, patient and didactic way of speaking, which often suggests to people that I am a teacher or social worker.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. But from what you've written you've been 'chucked out' several times and other times people have just not had the nerve to ask you to leave. Clearly you were making people feel uncomfortable if they wanted to ask you to leave but didn't have the nerve. Hopefully they didn't realise you were home educators and maybe just thought you condoned truancy or your child was off school for a teacher training day.

      Delete
  4. 'Hopefully they didn't realise you were home educators and maybe just thought you condoned truancy or your child was off school for a teacher training day.'

    I am sure that this is just what they thought! Flooding the comments page of a charity with angry messages from self-confessed home educators is apt to create more of a fuss than one parent and child squeezing into an event meant for schools.

    ReplyDelete
  5. So your flouting of the rules for your own benefit trumps a group of home educators doing their best to ensure the rules benefit the wider community? You're happy to have taken advantage of opportunities for yourself but couldn't care less about all those who might follow you into that situation?

    ReplyDelete
  6. I think people are irritated because changing the minimum booking size to 10 won't make a blind bit of difference to the problem of a school booking 60 seats and then not turning up. It just doesn't make any sense! And deleting Facebook comments and ignoring emails from people pointing this out isn't endearing them to anyone.

    A more sensible solution would be to actually try and enforce the £50 fine, which they clearly don't do at the moment, or to take a deposit on booking, to be refunded when the school/family turns up at the cinema.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "Instead of just jogging along and working the system like everybody else, they always seem to need special consideration. The rules never apply for them."

    So sneakily joining in with school groups for activities, 'individual action and breaking rules' to get into the films and climbing over zoo barriers shows you think the rules apply to you?

    ReplyDelete